Avoiding Crisis: Monitoring Your Network

Finally, you want to have a plan for the ongoing monitoring of your network. What are the critical services and devices that would cause disruption in the business if they were not available? Ongoing monitoring is the key to avoiding expensive and unpleasant surprises.

Decide on the key measures of availability and performance that are important to the organization and then measure them regularly. You should relate these statistics to the business goals of the company. For example, "Helped to fulfill our mission for quality customer service by ensuring that customer data was available online 99.99% of the time in the last quarter." Obviously, these key measures will vary, depending on the type of business and the risks associated with the unavailability of specific network services.